Urbek City Builder

I really wanted to like this game. I wanted to build the way I want like any good city builder allows, but the whole game is locked behind the longest tutorial I've ever played. I can't play any other map or mode until I finish the insanely long tutorial checklist map where you have to build the city they decide. The art style makes it impossible to see what's what without clicking on every building or playing on a colour-vomit overlay map where you still can't tell whats what. Everything is based on distances from other services, but you constantly have to replace things in order to fit new services in and then nothing works anymore. Not a fun, organic system.

Why is trains a DLC?? Maybe fix the game before DLC? Its not really a well fine tuned city builder at this point. Not a lot of freedom. Devs are not going to a right direction ngl

I really enjoyed this, Urbek is a neat spin on the city building genre. It's much more puzzle-like in that placement optimization matters more than it does in SimCity and similar, but not so much so that it becomes too complex. There's a nice series of systems at play where, say, you need more labor, so you build housing, but then you run low on food, so you go optimize your farms, and now you can build more housing but to upgrade it you need education, which means you need iron, and so you go build out an industrial neighborhood... etc etc. I was really surprised the different biome maps actually have different mechanics too, which complicate what and how you build. It's a little unbalanced here and there, but still, really impressive as the work of a single developer.

I'm just here to mention one thing only: if you appreciate that game and think you will explore and play it for some amount of time, immediately get the Trains DLC. Train stations are very powerful when connected to each other and boost the local output by A LOT. So don't sleep on it.

It's really fascinating to see a Chilean take on urban development. I like that part. However, it's not a city builder; it's a puzzle game. And a very restrictive puzzle game, at that. You don't place buildings because it's what the citizens would need, you place buildings because you need three of them within a certain radius to unlock another building, which itself has to be OUTSIDE that radius, but within the radius of a different building, which you can't build yet, because the population is too low. Or sometimes too high. It's all complete nonsense, and I found it exhausting in less than 30 minutes. I really dislike that it's marketed as a city building game, because it's not, at all. The Steam page doesn't outright lie, but it does only shows the purely aesthetic elements that don't affect the game at all, while completely omitting the core gameplay loop. You cannot, in fact, build your dream city; you build the city that the progression tree forces you to build.

Nice little puzzle-style city builder. Graphics are clear and sharp and have enough variety to give a bit of flavour and difference to your city builds.

A supricingly deep Citybuilder. The focus is on the building part. There is nearly no Management part, no trafic or somthing like this. But the Part where in a normal builder you would just place firestation and police down and everybody is happy is way more detaild, also a bit fimiky and puzzly.

Short Version: It's a puzzle game disguised as a city builder, but I did not find an ounce of challenge in the first hour of it. I did find that if I rotate the "construction site" stage of the building I want to place down, the game will orient the building randomly anyway, giving no way of actually rotating buildings the way you want. But this is not even the most limiting issue in the game's building. Pedestrians and cars disappear after mere seconds, the bloom effect is blinding. The game just feels like it has never been tested after being made, even though it has released years ago and it's current version is 1.9 . Long version: Urbek City provides a unique puzzle-like system of building your towns, for example you build your resident homes, but for them to upgrade to a villa they have to be far away from densely packed houses and have a park nearby. For lumberjack cabins you have to have a lumberjack hut nearby, but there can't be another cabin near it. This system is nice and engaging until you reach a description for an upgrade that reads like a math problem that has been written by a 6 year old, even so it can be fun to figure out how to solve these "puzzles." My biggest issue with the idea is that after you place down two or more resource buildings, you just spam a bunch of houses, then you spam some farms and cabins, then once again spam houses without an issue. There is no real challenge it feels like, as a 5x5 farm and 1 lumberjack hut is enough for 50 houses. To unlock more buildings and upgrades for houses you need to have 100's of houses. Now on to the objective issues of this system, it limits your creativity, greatly. Some buildings that generate needed resources are only allowed to be built if you build or not build some amount of this other building in it's area. The game has this sort of unique feature of pedestrian camera, but it really is just a glorified camera mode where you don't have the ability to fly, you move at quarter of a speed to left and right than you would forward. You clip through buildings, cars and as I found literally everything else. The bloom effects at night are BLINDING, NPCs that walk around your town disappear after about 10 seconds, same as cars. You can't select what road type to build, the game will decide what road they will "upgrade" to by whatever you build around it, although I did not get around to really try this, all my roads looked the same after turning into a road with pavement from a dirt path. You can't rotate buildings that you place down... well you can but it will rotate randomly when it gets built. I wanted to like this game as it looked cute and showed promise, but given the fact it seems it's not being worked on anymore even though it has been released years ago and has glaring issues like this, I cannot find myself recommending it. I will be refunding.

weird obscure game with a bunch of abstract rules

Looks like a city builder, plays more like a puzzle game. The freedom is really an illusion, and the way the systems work together means it kills all creativity in city building. You are pretty much forced to do things in certain order, located in certain places and so on. It has some entertainment value, but if you look for a city builder with the ability to actually do things your way this is really not it. Kinda of a weird one for sure. Runs great, works great.. just doesn´t quite understand what actually makes the genre so fun to begin with.